I was out with the lads on the practice field one day, and it occurred to me that I was enjoying every minute of it. I was fresh in my mind and my body felt relaxed. I made my passes, I ran easily as I geed up my players and then, when I was walking back to the dressing room, I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, we’re fighting so hard to get results, I’m doing everything except playing – and I can still play.’
I talked to a few of the players and to Nobby, who had joined me as a coach, and everyone’s reaction was the same. They said it would be fantastic if I came back. I experienced a great wave of excitement as I rushed to the office to put through the papers for my registration as a player. Driving home, I felt almost boyish again.
In all I played forty-five times for Preston and scored ten goals, not a bad ratio for an old-timer roaming around midfield. One outstanding memory is of a cup victory back in my old terrain. We played the famous amateur warriors of Bishop Auckland on a pitch exposed to a bitter wind. As we went out on the field I thought to myself, ‘This is nearly as bad as Katowice.’ I hammered home to the lads that old Jimmy Murphy law: when you are playing a team of lesser status the most important thing is to run as hard as they do. This, Jimmy always insisted, invariably neutralises their one possibility of success, their chasing and hustling of the more skilful side.
One of our best players, Tony Morley, who would go on to Everton and Aston Villa, profited most from our busy approach, and we won more easily than the 2–0 margin said. I felt I was getting more into the job of management, and playing again was a tremendous release of pressure – and also of some of that accumulation of frustration which had started building when it became obvious that the Manchester United I once knew and loved appeared to be breaking apart.
Naturally, given all my time at Old Trafford, it was not so easy to shake off the particular pain of being involved in such a rapid descent from the mountaintop. There were days when I yearned for the old certainties of that time when, he would later report, Sir Matt Busby would have a wee dram of Scotch before a game, in the blissful confidence that his team would not only win but also demonstrate all that he considered worthwhile in football. In that time when the club was clearly going wrong, I had tried to keep my own counsel, but sometimes you did find yourself confiding some of your worries and fears in a trusted team-mate. In the absence of Nobby and Shay Brennan, Tony Dunne, who had also known the best of times, was most often my confidant. On several occasions we agreed that the going had become harder than we could ever have imagined in the glory of the mid-sixties.
As Wilf McGuinness, Frank O’Farrell, and Tommy Docherty had all battled to reverse the trend, it was as though they were in pursuit of the unattainable when they tried to reproduce the authority of the Old Man. ‘It’s crazy,’ I once said to Tony. ‘No one can be a new Busby. His personality was just too big.’
I tried to remember some of the lessons I thought I had learned at United as I went about my business in Preston, and there were days when I did feel, despite my regrets about the lack of coaching qualifications, that I was indeed making a little progress. I liked the atmosphere at Deepdale; it was a friendly club, a genuine football place, and I couldn’t complain that the board were ungenerous. I also felt I was learning another side of football, the tougher aspects of the game you miss when you spend your playing career at places like United, Liverpool and Arsenal. At the top level, you take so much for granted: the first-class travel facilities, the fact that you walk a few yards after a match and a luxurious bus is waiting to whisk you away, staying in the best hotels, the way the team can be strengthened when a clear weakness has become apparent. It is why somebody like Alex Ferguson is eager today to send off young lads on loan: when he sent David Beckham to Preston, it was to give him more than the chance to play against mature players; it was also to toughen him to some of the realities of football life beyond a place like Old Trafford.
Recently, I saw a young manager from a lower division club in the reception lounge at United and I asked him how he was doing. He said, ‘I’m fine, but you know it is a struggle sometimes. I think I would go mad if I didn’t get to see how football is at the highest level, how good it can be. I’m not looking for players tonight, just seeing football as it should be – I’m just recharging the batteries.’ The remark took me back to Deepdale and my own battle to adjust to the manager’s life. In the end I concluded that if you attempt it without the coaching background – and without membership of that school of football men who, like Alex Ferguson each day, spend so much time talking to each other on the phone, spinning off ideas – you almost certainly need lots of money, and maybe an excessive reliance on the word of agents.
It was the workings of the transfer market that persuaded me that my position in that second season at Preston had become untenable. The problem was that some of the directors seemed to have started going behind
